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Salesforce Spring'17 Release

31st January 2017

Author Moses Fruean

The Salesforce Spring ’17 Release is coming! It promises more awesome features that are sure to further enhance the usability and functionalities of Salesforce

If your sandbox is on a preview instance, you can get an early look and experience Spring ’17 from January 6th 2017 through the Sandbox Preview Window. We’re always thinking about ways to innovate with Salesforce, so we’d like to share some of the cool features in this release that we think will add significant value.

Some of the features are currently only in beta or pilot but till could offer benefits to your organisation and signal more great functionality coming.

LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE

Since the launch of Lightning Experience, Salesforce has continued to add features to improve usability and functionality. Salesforce’s Spring ’17 release brings a number of Lightning Experience enhancements sure to improve the way users interact with and use Salesforce.

LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE READINESS CHECK:

Salesforce continues to add to the capabilities of the Lightning Experience Readiness Check. This release sees the addition of more customisations that can be evaluated using the Lightning Experience Readiness Check. The Readiness Check gives users a deeper understanding of how their organisation is positioned to adopt and use Lightning Experience. Keep an eye out, as Salesforce will continue to add more features and customisations to the Readiness Check.

To be sure, Salesforce recommends that even if you have checked your Lightning Experience Readiness previously, check it again to see what’s new.

Lightning Experience console apps retain much of the same functionality you see in Salesforce Classic but with an added touch of Lightning Experience styling. The flexibility of the Lightning platform will also enable users to customise Lightning Console apps with Lightning pages and components.

Salesforce is providing out-of-the-box console apps for Sales and Service, available in the App Launcher under Sales Console and Service Console. If a more customised console app is needed for your org, you can create your own console app in Lightning Experience with the New Lightning app wizard – you can change an app’s color & branding, add components to the utility bar, choose items to appear and configure user access.

RUN FLOWS WITH A LIGHTNING SKIN:

Lightning Runtime is now extending to your flows. Now your flows will look and feel like Lightning Experience. Simply enable Lightning Runtime from Process Automation settings.

Einstein’s intelligent predictions and insights will help your sales teams with leads, opportunities and customer relationships. Leads are scored using predictive intelligence and your company’s conversion patterns through Predictive Lead Scoring. Einstein users get access to Opportunity Insights, that predicts which deals are likely to be won. Account Insights uses Artificial Intelligence to assist your sales team with their customer relationships.

All these new features further improve the capability of your users to engage with prospective and existing customers. Note that for the time being, outgoing calls are supported for the U.S. and Canada only.

OTHER KEY SALES FEATURES:

SERVICE CLOUD

OMNI-CHANNEL – SUPERCHARGE YOUR SUPERVISORS:

Omni-channel is stepping it up with Omni-channel Supervisor. Omni-channel Supervisor provides your supervisors with real-time insights. Information about your Omni-channel agents, queues and work is streamed live! With Omni-channel, supervisors can see open work in real time.

LIGHTNING KNOWLEDGE:

Lightning Experience has arrived for Knowledge. Lightning Experience promises a high-powered and streamlined way to manage your knowledge base. Using search, you can easily do a Knowledge search or advanced search to narrow down your search. The Knowledge home page now provides one place for you to search, view, author, and manage articles.

OTHER KEY SERVICE FEATURES:

COMMUNITIES

COMMUNITY TEMPLATES:

Spring ’17 brings new features and components for communities too. Highlights include direct messages for community members, ability to comment on article feeds and see how often a topic is used. The addition of a nested navigation menu items also lets you create a parent heading for your navigation menu and nest items underneath.

OTHER KEY COMMUNITIES FEATURES:

ANALYTICS

REPORTS AND DASHBOARDS – NEW FEATURES IN LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE:

Lightning Experience brings big changes to Reports and Dashboards. You can now subscribe to up to five reports which are emailed to you, ensuring you’re always kept informed. You can also schedule when you receive refreshed reports i.e. daily, weekly, monthly.

Whether you’d like to start discussions about a chart or update your team, you can now share Dashboard charts on chatter. Salesforce has also added the capability to follow dashboards ensuring you’re always up-to-date.

OTHER KEY ANALYTICS FEATURES INCLUDE:

OTHER SPRING ’17 UPDATES

LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE BROWSER SUPPORT:

Salesforce has updated web browser support for Lightning Experience. Lightning Experience is supported for Apple Safari v9.x and 10.x on Mac OS X, Microsoft Edge for Windows 10 and the most recent versions of Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

This release signals the retirement of Lightning Experience support for Internet Explorer 11 (IE11). Users of existing orgs can continue using IE11 to use Lightning Experience until December 16, 2017. There is no IE11 access to Lightning Experience for new orgs created after Summer ’16 – if this is you, you’ll be redirected to Salesforce Classic. Salesforce recommend IE users use the latest version that is supported by Salesforce and apply all Microsoft software updates.

BUILD AI POWERED APPS FAST (PILOT):

Spring ’17 brings the capability to build AI-Powered Apps Fast. Predictive Vision Service will allow developers to use image recognition to build AI-Powered Apps. Although Salesforce is just releasing this feature as a pilot, it presents some cool possibilities for app functionalities which will further enrich customer engagement including:

Capability to provide customers with visual filters to easily find products that best their preferences; and

Capability to gain a deeper understanding of customer preferences through images they publish on social media

EXTERNAL SERVICES (BETA):

If you’ve ever wanted to easily connect your Salesforce org to an external service of your choice, this release gives you exactly what you need. Salesforce is rolling out a beta version of External Services that will allow the connection of Salesforce orgs to an external service with the help of an easy-to-use wizard – users just need to provide basic information such as the service name and schema endpoint and they’ll be ready to start building.

That’s all for now but be sure to check out the full Spring ’17 Release notes to read more about other features in the release or more details about the features we’ve talked about in this post. We’re here to help you get the most out of Salesforce, so if any of these features look good to you, get in contact with us at Davanti Consulting and we’ll discuss how best to use its capabilities to deliver benefits for your organisation.

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